The biro was blue. Percy had kept it since childhood.
When he still spoke to me.
"I'm trying to set this tiny ball into the ink tube of this ballpoint pen just so. We don't want it drowning in the tube, but we mustn't allow it to escape."
"Why not?"
"Because then it wouldn't be able to gather up and spin out the ink!"
Percy worked for one man who couldn't remember his name, and another who merely considered him a useful cog in the Order.
Neither of them, he thought, clenching his father's old pen, will tell me anything.